"Time is never time at all
You can never ever leave
Without leaving a piece of youth
And our lives are forever changed
We will never be the same"
- Smashing Pumpkins

"Our main problem, and one that we share with all other earthly creatures, is what to do next."
- Jim Harrison

The hop from Amboseli to Nairobi was painless, and our quick drive-by of downtown Nairobi tended to underscore why we weren't being dropped off in the city proper. Lamentably, these days, Nairobi is literally one of the most dangerous and crime-ridden cities on the planet. The recent terrorist attack in Mombassa wasn't precisely a cause for less concern, either. Accordingly, we rolled into one last camp site cum hostel, about 25 minutes outside of town. Initially, I was distraught at this. I'd carried my "Insight Pocket Kenya" across 10,000 kilometers of Africa, chiefly for its Nairobi map and transport info  and, also, for things to do on our last day and a half in Africa. I'd been somewhat interested to see, despite its advertised shortcomings, the Kenyan capital. Also, I confess, at this point, I was somewhat keen to shoulder my bag, step onto a curb, and show the back of myself to the truck  and to certain of its passengers of the trip's second half. Instead, there we were, still all together, at yet another camp site . . . preparing another communal lunch. I asked Paul how hard it would be to find transport to downtown. His response was measured, but unequivocal: "That would not be very clever," he allowed.

So I instead sucked it up and settled down to one last camp chair repast of pretty much the last dregs from the ontruck kitchen. Then we helped Paul and Dudu clean up the interior of the truck a bit and then said our solemn farewells. "Go well," I said, reflecting back at Paul the fine parting I'd picked up from him. And of an instant, Paul (and Sid) had rolled through the camp gates  us waving our hats in heartfelt salute  and out of our lives. We were on our own. Albeit, Mark and I uncomplainingly sprang for a private (not to say comfortable, or clean) double room, and settled ourselves in privacy. We had the rest of the day  and all of the next  to get through before our flights out on the third day. And we slowly abandoned any ideas of going in town and looking at Nairobi. On reflection, we'd just got through nearly two months (and 10,000 kilometers) of Africa without losing anything, being ripped off in any way, being robbed or attacked, or getting at all sick (from the dozens of endemic diseases available) or in any way hurt (including at the claws of the local fauna). This was quite a record, and we were well content to play protectively of our winnings and concentrate on taking it easy, and getting safely to those flights out.

We ate. The camp had a very serviceable restaurant  including with a vegan breakfast option! Mark and I repeatedly indulged in the veggie burger platter, with fries. Fattening, but what the hell. We slept  in beds (albeit with mosquito netting draped over them). We sat around and read. I wrote up Serengeti dispatches, and posted them (the camp office had a machine with a dialup connection which could be rented). We watched CNN International on the tv in the bar. We divested ourselves of much gear. This was actually a great joy, and one to which we had been looking forward. First to go was the majority of the soiled (and in some cases ripped) clothing. My sandals were completely shot, and got dropped in a bin. Guidebooks. My SA-style can opener, my vegetable scraper/scrubber (which I never once used). Quite a lot of other fagged items which are escaping me now. Our loads, at any rate, got much lighter.

After that we lay around the room and talked at great length, recollecting the trip, making plans, continuing our long-running, blustery debate about the merits of classic literature versus contemporary literary fiction (into which I will refrain from extensive divagation here). I made a "mix tape" of MP3s; this included some tracks we'd listened to on the truck (Limp Bizkit), some old historical faves (The Police), some African stuff (Johnny Clegg & Suvuka), some African AMERICAN stuff (Public Enemy), and some of my essential stuff onto which I still hoped to turn Mark (Curve, Machines of Loving Grace). Then we endeavored to listen to all the Kate Bush songs  in alphabetical order. We spent probably an hour and a half solemnly discussing Kate's innumerable and awe-inspiring virtues.

* * *

And at last the 20th  our exfil day  rolled around. Lamentably, Mark's flight was about 10 hours later than mine. However, he decided to go to the airport with me  partly on the theory (ultimately falsified) that the airport would have more and better entertainment options than the camp site. We also wanted to share a cab, and have him see me off  which he also didn't get to do, being unable to check in (and access the gates) until several hours later. C'est la vie. Shortly, for my part at least, I was settled onto an uneventful Kenya Air/KLM flight to Amsterdam. It was kind of a cool longitudinal flight through the crepuscular sky and over the Alps, which is the first time I've seen them from the air.

I landed at Amsterdam's Schipol in the early evening (though at this latitude, on Dec. 20, the evening starts at about 4pm), took the train to good ole Centraal Station, and then a cab in search of the abode of Cousin Maureen (aka Mo . . . CoMo?), who has a place on the south end of VondelPark. The cab ride was rather longer than I'd anticipated, and the twelve Euros I'd assiduously hoarded from my last stopover (and then trekked all the way across Africa) looked as if they were going to be inadequate. I winced at the fare meter until it was at €11.20, then warned the cabbie that, much to my chagrin, unless we were basically there, I'd have to ask him to stop at a cash machine. He averred that we were pretty nearly in the ballpark  and shut off the meter! God love the eminently easygoing Dutch.

I ascended to Mo's 3rd-ish floor walk up (the exiguous, perilously steep, little Amsterdam townhouse stairways make it seem a lot higher), greeted my beloved relation and host, and attempted to settle in and catch up; albeit I was feeling pretty shellshocked from the flight, the ground transport  and the ass-kicking cold, which was a shock after equatorial Kenya, I can go ahead and tell you. Mo had attempted to warn me of the closeness in which I was to be quartered, in part by asking if I had ever "showered in a kitchen?" I'd assumed this to be hyperbole, but in fact there was a shower stall at the end (though it's misleading to describe a room so small as having an "end") of the kitchen  supplied with the same electrically-heated water as the sink. (This is, I am now given to understand, a space-saving convention not uncommon in Europe.) At any rate, my excessive torpor wore off a bit, probably not unrelatedly to the arrival of Mo's disconcertingly attractive Australian flatmate, Susan. She came home while Mo had run out to pick up what ultimately presented itself as candidate for best Mediterranean meal of my life. (She knows a guy nearby, who's like, the Middle Eastern take-out king of the Netherlands.) Yum. Then I was bedded down in a situation well superior to the one I'd been enjoying for weeks  great piles of air mattress and sleeping bag and sheets and comforter. In the morning, Mo put me on the tram for Centraal  and even gave me coins (not to say small ones) for tram fair! All in all, I can faithfully report that her hospitality well lived up to the supremely high standards set by her clan in Washington D.C. (where I've spent more Christmases, long weekends, and random stopovers than I can count  but not nearly as many as I hope to).

From there it was the piddling Europe-to-East Coast hop. Pops and my sister Danielle (aka D) picked me up at the MARTA station. I checked into Chez Mama, threw my stuff down  and put on civilian clothes (though not yet civilian hair) for the first time in a while. And then I proceeded to spend a typical, lovely family Christmas with all but one sister. (Sara is being all bad and trekking South America, including walking up to Macchu Pichu on Christmas Day.) However, D was around in fine form. Also Erin (aka Tiny E). The two of them helped me divide up, on Christmas Eve, my huge pile of African gift swag (which still exuded a certain nimbus of pelf, coming as most of it did from Zimbabwe's national going-out-of-business sale). For this service, naturally enough, I gave them first dibs on whatever they wanted for themselves. Among other things, Erin scored the tiny, humbly lovely giraffe head that I originally picked out for Dana. E, by the by, won't forgive me if I fail to include this picture of a picture of yours truly at age 13 or so, in quite the mid-80s fashion ensemble. Okay, you buggers, laugh it up.

* * *

And that's that. Or is it? Africa is said to be a life-changing experience. If for that reason alone, this series of dispatches would seem to require at least some attempt at a wrap-up. There are a couple of difficulties with this, the first of which would seem to be the sudden and dramatic deliquescence of my energy and motivation for such a project. The second, more justifiable, is the fact that it generally seems to take me about a year to get my mind around these trips  what they were really like, in their whole more than their particulars, what they meant, what their place is in this jagged narrative I'm trying to make of my existence. So there's that.

But for now, as a stopgap, and as a bow to the convention of closure . . . I guess I can volunteer that many of the moments on this trip  not the dramatic, lush ones, but the quiet, still, reflective, sort of empty ones  seemed to hand up to me a number of little offerings of, let's call it, self-knowledge. I seemed to be able to, for once, get my head a little more firmly around certain aspects of my ongoing project to be the person I ardently hope and intend to (one day) be; as well my other project to live the kind of life I want for myself (particularly in light of the fact that this is the only one I get). This wasn't entirely unprecedented. I find that I am often very different people at different time slices  I suppose it's my angels and demons battling for control of the machine. When the angels are at the helm, and all I need to do is bright and clear, I tend to leave forceful, little, morally suasive messages for later selves  ones who might have loosed their grip on the controls, and who will need the guidance and insight. In other words, I write myself memos. And I wrote a whole series of them  I called them "alerts," alerting future selves to the conclusions from my moments of African clarity  at various times and places along the sub-Saharan road. At moments, I swear it was so CLEAR to me what I needed to do, and how I should go about things. And, I guess, who can put a price tag on that? I will embarrass none of us by reproducing the contents of those notes here, but I will share some headings, which should give the basic idea:

There was an HONOR ALERT, a SOUL ALERT, and a SELF-MASTERY ALERT  all of which I trust will benefit, in ways larger or smaller, my immortal &c. I can further hope that my future path will prove to have been illumined by the LIFE-NARRATIVE ALERT, the PERSISTENCE ALERT, and the clarion call of a COURAGE-TO-LIVE-IT ALERT. (These were buttressed by a (non-alert-style) WHAT YOU'RE GOING TO DO IN Q1'03 (AND BEYOND) and an amendment, to wit, WHAT'S *REALLY* GOING TO HAPPEN IN Q1'03.) Somewhat more prosaically, I felt the need of a GET-OVER-YOURSELF ALERT (acutely, in that case) and an HONOR-YOUR-FATHER ALERT. One can always stand a few good workaday lifestyle tips in the form of MENTAL HEALTH, WEIGHT MANAGEMENT, and CAREER "JOYFULNESS" ALERTS. There was even an official SPIRITUAL LESSON OF THE FIRST HALF OF THE TRIP (and it was a fine, humbling one), and an otherwise unaffiliated INSTRUCTION to myself. Finally, there was a (highly synopsized) rundown of what I've done with my life (so far) and (more importantly) what I've made of myself (also so far)  and I quietly and gratefully realized that I don't have any real complaints about any of it. Not one bit. It all suits me (the only person, luckily, it has any need of suiting) very, very nicely. All in all, a veritable Mead "Fat 'Lil Notebook" of small-scale personal enlightenment. Nomad Adventure Tours never put "Self Knowledge" on the list of tour highlights, but I guess that was always in the margins, or one should hope it is, on a trip like this.

And since I'm right here in the back of the notebook, I herewith include an abridged "Catchphraseology" from the trip:

"I really respect your hat."

" . . . Can I borrow your pants?"

"WRAP-a-round Diiiildo!"

"And it feels . . . good . . . it feels . . . so . . . good."

"Accommodate THIS!"

"That had better not be a spider crawling on my #$%*s . . ."

Of course, there's only person on the planet who will appreciate any of that. I've thanked him before, but consider the above my final token of bottomless appreciation. As seemingly always, I learned a great, great deal from my friend Mark Pitely. You're a good man, Charlie Brown.

* * *

And Africa? Of course, it wasn't anything like what I expected. But it never, ever is. This to the point that I've quite given up having expectations of places. Lately I just close my eyes and jump in. I did at least hope that this trip would provide, if it lived up to its billing, all the Africa I would reasonably need for a long time. And I reckon it did. Across eight countries and at least a half dozen radically different climates, we saw a lifetime's worth of heart-thrummingly dramatic natural beauty. Amongst the people, we saw much soul-crushing poverty  but plenty of hope and happiness in the midst of it. We met a real African or three (and verily benefited from it). We got our hands (and the rest of us) dirty roughing it, and drew a great deal of joy and strength from camp life on the Savannah. We navigated rivers, deltas, craters, grass plains, and thousands of kilometers of roads; we climbed over rock mountains and giant sand dunes, stood at the edges of mighty falls and canyons, sloshed through rich sucking mud, lounged on boulder-strewn beaches, and threaded city streets both ancient and modern. We wilted under our hats from the blasting and sanguinary African desert sun, ogled slack-jawed in the dead night air at the sprawling southern hemispheric dome  gravid with infinite and unfamiliar constellations, and stood rooted and humble before the most thoroughly pulchritudinous and soul-tweaking sunsets and dawns one might ever hope to see. We met some amazing people  including our intrepid South African leader and 23-year old man among men Paul, and 18-year old study in English courage Ms. Laura Helen McGregor. And we saw the famous wildlife. What animals did we see? All of them, as it turned out (with the single exception of cheetah, which never did turn up). Basically, across six different game parks, we saw every animal people generally go to southern or eastern Africa to look at. And not just from the backs of game-viewing trucks. We also stalked elephants and warthogs on the open ground, and paddled on the water amongst hippos and crocs. We shared camp sites (and uneasy detentes) with leopards, (more) elephants, and (many more) hippos. We cavorted nearly nose-to-nose with monkeys, ostriches, completely deadly snakes, and huge exotic bugs. We walked through and around flora that had survived millennia in the birthplace of all that implacably munches only by evolving  virtually every stalk and frond  into naturally occurring barbed wire. And I pulled off the photography of several lifetimes. So, yeah, okay: Africa's something else. And it was truly a heck of a trip. I thank you all very kindly for coming along; as you've figured out by now, that's in large part what makes it real for me.

And I suppose that leaves only one thing (see (second) opening quote):

Next: ????????

You're actually a lot more likely to get malaria in or near a population center than, say, in a mosquito-infested swamp (like the Okavango Delta). To actually infect you, a mosquito has to bite a currently malarial person and then bite YOU within 24 hours. Malaria needs population density to keep things moving along.
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Mark lamenting that he was down to his last couple of hundred pages. "If you're not careful, you won't make it back to the States." "If I'm not careful, I won't make it through tonight!" I knew before this that Mark was the best reader I've ever known  but I actually had an insufficient sense. For instance, there was the contest in grade school which challenged kids to try and read more books than their fellows over the summer. Mark gamely took up the challenge, which he won  by reading 600 books (an order of magnitude, and then some, I gather, more than the first runner up).
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I do love this technological era. The moment seemed to call for a custom mix, so I whipped one up. Since my return, I've taken to burning mix CDs for people. That's great fun.
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In our last few days on the truck, we had what I considered to be the valuable pop cultural experience of listening to the new Eminem album (en toto; a couple of times). I found several things about it admirable, or at least impressive, though I won't unload third-rate music criticism in this space. I do want to relate Mark's contrast with Public Enemy  when I put on their seminal "911 is a Joke": "Today," he said, "Eminem is considered 'controversial' because he's shouting profanity on the radio and pissing off the FCC. Public Enemy was controversial because they were an actual threat to the power structure! Eminem's spouting vulgarities, and PE is talking about emergency services being unwilling to come into poor black neighborhoods . . ."
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"Now I dialed 911 a long time ago
Don't you see how late they're reactin'?
The only come  they come when they wanna
So get the morgue truck and embalm the goner
They don't care 'cause they stay paid anyway
If your life is on the line, then you're dead todaySo get up a get get get down
911 is a joke in yo town
Get up a get get get down
Late 911 wears the late crown
You'd better wake up and smell the real flavor
'Cause 911 is a FAKE life saver"(hide)

Pretty amazing we still had stuff talk about (TONS of stuff to talk about) after two months of sharing either a small tent, or a narrow truck seat, about 16 hours a day.
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I think we made it about to "One Last Look Around the House Before We Go." When we'd gotten from "Between a Man and a Woman" to "Cloudbusting," Mark perked up, looked briefly puzzled, then exclaimed, "Ah! it must be filed under 'THE Big Sky'."
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Well, except for just one tiny, little bit. One of my major beefs with much of "classic literature" is, not to put too fine a point on it, the endless unfocused maundering. When someone recently suggested to me, for instance, that "The Brothers Karamazov" was the greatest novel of all time, I replied that it certainly could have been  with a competent editor, about 350 pages of elisions, and something in some way resembling a narrative structure to it. Mark talks a lot about richness, and texture, and the patience required of a reader for a really rewarding novelistic experience  but I'm not quite buying. Mark did score some good points in our ongoing discussion, which I will omit, while including one great point I scored, as follows: Mark happens to have taught me a great deal about the craft of storytelling (whether in the form of fiction, or of screenwriting). One of the most important lessons he hammered home is that "writers are people who are good at killing their own babies." That is to say, as he did say it, it is necessary to ruthlessly eliminate everything from your story that does not either go directly to moving the narrative along, or else expand the essential theme or themes of the work. And, then, just because something does fit those criteria doesn't necessarily mean it can stay! Well, my question was: Why do we have to hold ourselves to these standards, but not so the writers whose work we read? (Particularly those who wrote before 1900?) Muhahahaha; one for me.
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Not least so (ie disconcerting in her attractiveness) because I was later to sleep about 2.5 feet away from her (on the floor between the two beds).
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She'd actually tried to entrain us into delivering her an actual giraffe skull, at which project we entirely failed. Ultimately, I picked up a larger, better wooden giraffe mask for her, which took the place of the little giraffe head toothpick (to Erin's gain).
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After experiencing a couple of 13-hour Frankfurt-to-SFOs, a 9-hour Amsterdam-to-ATL barely gives you time to settle in and get comfortable.
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Oh, yeah  here are a couple of really good Mark/bug shots that I unforgivably neglected to include before now:

I was fascinated to discover the extent to which news programs are geared to those who've been out of touch for several hours  not several weeks. For instance, we learned a great deal about various folks' (including Colin Powell's) reaction to Trent Lott's solecism  without learning, for days, what he had actually said that was so offensive. Also, I actually watched a half-hour-long financial program  without remotely being able to figure out what the markets had done in the two months I'd be gone. "Well, as we all know, after premarket jitters, the Dow is down 85 points on heavy volume . . ." Yes  but is it down 85 points from 12,000, or from 8,000??!! I didn't find out until days later.
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Don't get me wrong  there are tons of things I still want to see and do; a bunch of key accomplishments I haven't nearly pulled off yet; a great deal about my self (character, habits of thought and action) that needs serious (and, in some cases, urgent) work; and much that I just want to do better. But, I mean to say, I have no complaints about "progress to date"; and, also, what I've gotten out of the years I've spent so far.
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Did I never tell the story about how I followed that troupe of vervet monkeys in the Delta half-way up an inclined tree, and then attempted to mimick their squawks and head-bobs trying to fit in, until their alpha males finally got serious about driving me off and sort of started encircling me and shrieking and beating their chests, and I finally said, "Okay, you guys win, you're sure enough scaring me, I'm out of here"? Pity.
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Fuchs is the author of the novels The Manuscript and Pandora's Sisters, both published worldwide by Macmillan in hardback, paperback and all e-book formats (and in translation); the D-Boys series of high-tech, high-concept, spec-ops military adventure novels  D-Boys, Counter-Assault, and Close Quarters Battle (coming in 2016); and is co-author, with Glynn James, of the bestselling Arisen series of special-operations military ZA novels. The second nicest thing anyone has ever said about his work was: "Fuchs seems to operate on the narrative principle of 'when in doubt put in a firefight'." (Kirkus Reviews, more here.)

Fuchs was born in New York; schooled in Virginia (UVa); and later emigrated to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he lived through the dot-com boom. Subsequently he decamped for an extended period of tramping before finally rocking up in London, where he now makes his home. He does a lot of travel blogging, most recently of some verylongwalks around the British Isles. He's been writing and developing for the web since 1994 and shows no particularly hopeful signs of stopping.

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